Under Pressure

Not that what I eat has anything to do with what I shoot, I mean, with a camera, at least...

Good news for the Tooloose homestead...I just received a new pressure cooker. Little known factoid about me is that I love to cook. About 4-5 years ago I went through all my spices and ingredients and completely stocked my shelves with necessities for cooking Indian food. IMHO, it is the best, the absolute best in the world. The hot spicy dishes keep my sinuses clear, for one thing.

A pressure cooker is a necessity for Indian cooking. The legumes/lentils (dal) cook up in a flash under pressure. I have a huge pressure cooker for massive doses of this wonderful cuisine, and a much smaller one, an Indian utensil, for small quantities, and for pressure cooking rice. The Indian cookers are quite different than my American-friendly unit as the Indian cookers work on the principle of building up steam, then blowing it off in a huge blast that might last a few seconds, and cooking is measured in 'whistles,' whereas my Fagor cooks in minutes. Both are great and together, I make some damn yummy meals.

I've been at this for a while now and have quite a library of Indian cookbooks. And I have been honored...a former client of mine grew up in India to a rather privileged life, from what I understand. She did not cook at home. After many discussions of Indian food, she confessed that I knew more about cooking Indian food than her, and even gave me a cookbook from her motherland that she never used.

Dals are my favorite, and usually that with rice will fill me nicely. But I love the vegetables, too, especially eggplant and okra. Since I shop at Indian markets, I also enjoy the wonderful fresh vegetables used in traditional Indian cooking, the various squashes, (opo (aka long squash), winter squash, cayote, bitter melon, etc.) and love to cook simple meals from South India, rasams and sambhars.

I submitted a recipe of my own design to a really excellent You Tube channel that presents Indian recipes, and it was featured here. If you like Indian food, this is a great show to watch. And it certainly doesn't hurt that the two ladies are extremely cute. ;)

So I will be blowing off some steam in my kitchen, butt worry not...I won't be posting pictures of my cooking, neither before or after consumption.

I do also cook Middle Eastern and Thai dishes as well.

Got any favorite recipes in these cuisines, please post to this blog.

Feeling Foggy

Finally...some fog. It wasn't thick as pee soup butt I'll take it anyway.

I love the fog, the mystery behind it. I can almost sense the invisible earth forces at work in the watery visions of fog. And it seems to active in the cemetery, amongst the dead. And like the watery element, the fog environment changes so rapidly, thickening, thinning, lifting, descending. I was very fortunate this time, anticipating the fog and heading out before sunrise to various cemeteries in the area. One day, last Thursday, was very special. The large cemetery I visited had so many different views and settings of the fog. The most spectacular moment, though, was when the sun was beginning to rise. I really felt a sense of piety for some reason. The autumn is truly MY time of year, the time when I have feel my soul forces bursting with a great joy of the return of the elemental forces to the earth, gathering underneath my feet, preparing for the winter.

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Equal Time

It's 'that' time of year again...when the forces of light and dark are equally balanced on the equinox. The yearly cycle has been a fascination for years. Many years in fact. It probably isn't evident from my photo gallery, but I am quite taken with Nature, the diversity and just the whole process of life...and death. Now we are into my season, the season of colors, of harvest, of chilly temps and hot apple cider, of spicy squash soup, and even the college football games that mean nothing to me. Then after, Nature strips. Black and white. Everything.

I even enjoy early winter and the most uplifting day of the year has to be the winter solstice, when the forces of darkness have reached its zenith and the forces of light are being to wax. If the temperature is not overly cold, it can be such a wonderful day/night. I sometimes wonder what this day was like at a stone site eons ago, like Knoweth in Ireland (never been there), when on the morning of the solstice, a beam of light travels down the passageway of the entrance, hits a special crystal, and the entire inner chamber is filled with a burst of light, signaling the event.

The least exciting season change for me has to be summer. How odd, the forces of light reach their maximum and the hot temperatures are yet to follow.

The whole planet is a living organism onto itself, breathing in for the winter and breathing out for the summer, as new life bursts forth from the earth. It is an amazing process, something I think about often.